Retaliation for the August 7, 1998, African embassy bombings took place on August 20, 1998. “When the smoke cleared following the hit by sixty-five U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles, costing about $750,000 each… Bin Laden and top members of Al Qaeda were not among them [the casualties]. …In the end, the only winner was Osama bin Laden. All along his goal, and that of his top leadership, was to draw the United States deeper and deeper into the sinkhole of a war in the Middle East. [Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader] Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s close associate and confidant, argued that Al Qaeda should bring the war to ‘the distant enemy’ in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and ‘personally wage the battle against the Muslims.’ It was that battle that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri wanted to spark.”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Pages 209-210